Succession
Succession, 2018 Video installation: HD video, 2 sided projection screen, cut vinyl mirror dance floor and charred wood , 25’x25’
Shadowtime 4, 5, 6, 7, 2018 Mural drawings: matte wall paint, charcoal and graphite, 22’x 11’, 22’x12’, 15’x 10’, 12’ x14’
commisioned for Be Not Still, Living in Uncertain Times, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Sonoma, California.
Succession, features choreographed movement made in collaboration with Hope Mohr Dance Company. It was filmed on the north end of di Rosa’s property, where the ground and trees burned in the 2017 wildfires. By performing with charred trees and singed earth, the dancers bring life to what seems dead, honoring what was and what will become. The work suggests potential through this physical, intimate connection.
The sculptural video installation includes a patterned mirror floor made of fragmented shapes cut in vinyl used for dance floors. Inspired by Judy Dater’s 1981 photograph ‘Self Portrait with Steam Vent’, the floor extends the spatial qualities of the video and reflects viewers that choose to walk on it. Charred pieces of wood blackened from the fires also occupy the floor, giving agency to the earth inside the gallery space.
The video installation is surrounded by four wall murals, Shadowtime 4, 5, 6, 7 , made of layered contour drawings in charcoal and graphite. The walls are painted in deep grays up to varying heights to reference to the burn marks on trees which reveal the path taken by fire. The drawings combine images of the singed trees with images of other natural disasters that occurred in 2017 to call up the condition of living in continuous aftermath as a global condition.